History Of The Pacific States Of North America Literary Industries 1890

The Pacific Northwest--for the purposes of this book mostly Oregon and Washington--has sometimes been seen as lacking significant cultural history. Home to idyllic environmental wonders, the region has been plagued by the notion that the best and brightest often left in search of greater things, that the mainstream world was thousands of miles away--or at least as far south as California. This book describes the Pacific Northwest's search for a regional identity from the first Indian-European contacts through the late twentieth century, identifying those individuals and groups "who at least struggled to give meaning to the Northwest experience." It places particular emphasis on writers and other celebrated individuals in the arts, detailing how their lives and works both reflected the region and also enhanced its sense of self.

A generation after the U.S. conquest of California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo set out to write the story of the land he knew so well—a history to dispel the romantic vision quickly overtaking the state’s recent past. The five-volume history he produced, published here for the first time in English translation, is the most complete account of California before the gold rush by someone who resided in California at the time. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California, such as the Monterey Constitutional Convention and the first legislature. With his project, undertaken for historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, Vallejo sought to correct misrepresentations of California’s past, which dismissed as insignificant the pre–gold rush Spanish and Mexican periods—conflated into one “Mission era.” Instead, Vallejo’s history emphasized the role of the military in the Spanish colonization of California and argued that the missionaries after Junípero Serra, with their medieval ideas, had actually retarded the development of California until secularization in the early 1830s. Culture, he contended, was of intense interest to the Californio people, as was the education of children. His accounts of Indigenous peoples, while often sympathetic, were also characteristic of his time: he and other California military leaders, Vallejo maintained, had successfully subdued “hostile” Indians and established mutually beneficial relationships with others. Out of keeping with Bancroft’s American triumphalism, Vallejo’s monumental project was consigned to the archives. With their deft translation and commentary, Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz—authors of a companion volume on Vallejo’s work—have brought to light a remarkable perspective, often firsthand, on important events in early California history. Their efforts restore a critical chapter to the story of California and the American West.

Series statement from author's Material dreams. Bibliography: p. 460-479.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–90) grew up in Spanish California, became a leading military and political figure in Mexican California, and participated in some of the founding events of U.S. California. In 1874–75, Vallejo, working with historian and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, composed a five-volume history of Alta California—a monumental work that would be the most complete eyewitness account of California before the gold rush. But Bancroft shelved the work, and it has lain in the archives until its recent publication as Recuerdos: Historical and Personal Remembrances Relating to Alta California, 1769–1849, translated and edited by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz. In Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo: Life in Spanish, Mexican, and American California, Beebe and Senkewicz not only illuminate Vallejo’s life and history but also examine the broader experience of the nineteenth-century Californio community. In eight essays, the authors consider Spanish and Mexican rule in California, mission secularization, the rise of rancho culture, and the conflicts between settlers and Indigenous Californians, especially in the post-mission era. Vallejo was uniquely positioned to provide insight into early California’s foundation, and as a defender of culture and education among Mexican Californians, he also offered a rare perspective on the cultural life of the Mexican American community. In their final chapter, Beebe and Senkewicz include a significant portion of the correspondence between Vallejo and his wife, Francisca Benicia, for what it reveals about the effects of the American conquest on family and gender roles. A long-overdue in-depth look at one of the preeminent Mexican Americans in nineteenth-century California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo also provides an unprecedented view of the Mexican American experience during that transformative era.